New UB medical school design and layout encourage collaboration

“Anytime you can place a high-density workforce at the intersection of a high-capacity transit system, can live anywhere along the corridor, can create a mixed use family of activities at the street level, and can find a way to go to work and go home without your car, you have successful transit-oriented development.”

The primary goal of the design for UB’s new downtown
School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences is to create new
opportunities for interactions between UB medical students and
faculty members in clinical and basic science departments,
according to Kenneth Drucker, FAIA, design principal for the
project and design director for HOK’s New York office.

“To bring together academia and research, the design
sandwiches the three research floors between the more public parts
of the medical education program on the lower floors and the more
specialized, pedagogical components, such as the human anatomy
suite, on the upper floors,” he says. A common atrium
and second-floor “piano nobile,” or principal level,
fosters collaboration between educators, researchers and the
greater Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus community.

Faculty, researchers and students will have clinical
responsibilities on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, which will
be physically connected to the medical school's “piano
nobile” level by an enclosed bridge across High Street.

By providing opportunities for learning, researching and
credentialing for medical practitioners from across the Buffalo
Niagara Medical Campus, the building creates a true academic
medical campus.

And while the new building is clearly modern, it acknowledges
the city’s architectural history, notes Robert G. Shibley,
dean of the UB School of Architecture and Planning and head of the
committee that selected HOK to design the UB medical school.
“Our goal was to find expression for a new medical school
that is comfortable with some of the historical circumstances that
surround it and that is typical of sites across Buffalo where new
and old work well together.”

The medical school design does this through the use of an open
interior space, similar to other large urban buildings in Buffalo,
such as the Ellicott Square Building or the Market Arcade building.
“Just like these buildings, the new medical school will
appear to take up a whole city block, but it actually has an open
interior that invites social engagement and creates an opportunity
for natural light within the interior, increasing the utility of
space inside the core of the building,” he says.

In addition to fostering interactions within the UB medical
school and the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the new building
will further the development of an active, vibrant community with
its integration of the NFTA's Allen Street transit hub.

“This is the transit-oriented development that the
state-of-the-art in city building calls for,” says Shibley.
“Anytime you can place a high-density workforce at the
intersection of a high-capacity transit system, can live anywhere
along the corridor, can create a mixed use family of activities at
the street level, and can find a way to go to work and go home
without your car, you have successful transit-oriented
development.”

Shibley says that the new medical school will further strengthen
Buffalo’s NFTA-Metro system. “Buffalo already
has, in terms of performance and ridership density, a
well-functioning, though short, Metro system,” he says.
“This new development will presumably increase efficiency
while increasing ridership without increasing demand for capacity
in the overall system. We had room for more riders and the new
medical school will give us more.”

The Metro station’s location in UB’s new medical
school building provides mass transit options not only to students,
faculty and employees but also to patients, families and other
visitors to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

It also provides a front door to the medical campus and to
Buffalo’s growing downtown. “The design of the new
medical school vertically marks the junction,” says Shibley,
“marking one’s arrival at the same time in Allentown,
on the medical campus and downtown.”

HOK’s Drucker concluded: "The entire community has been
incredibly supportive during the design process. The high level of
cooperation we have experienced with all the constituents –
including Allentown and Fruit Belt neighborhood groups, agencies
such as NFTA and users of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus
– is unprecedented in my professional experience."

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